What's next for Ryan? Congress

November 7, 2012 — 11:32pm

M. Spencer Green, Associated PressVice President Joe Biden talked to President Obama early Wednesday at their victory party in Chicago. As the president returns to Washington, he faces a worsening civil war in Syria now spilling its borders, a year-end fiscal showdown with a Congress largely unchanged by the recent election, and his own second-term staffing issues.

Paul Ryan said Wednesday that he will return to Congress, but will spend some time with his family first.

Ryan was re-elected Tuesday to his House seat from southeastern Wisconsin on the same night that he and Mitt Romney came up short in their bid to unseat President Obama and Vice President Joe Biden. State law allowed him to run for both offices simultaneously.

In a statement released from Boston, Ryan, 42, said he was grateful for the chance to be part of a national campaign. "I am immensely proud of the campaign we ran, and I remain grateful to Gov. Romney for the honor of being his running mate," he said.

Advisers had been weighing whether Ryan would be best served by returning to Congress for an eighth term if he were planning to run for president in 2016.

ASSOCIATED PRESS

NO FLORIDA RESULTS UNTIL THURSDAY

Miami-Dade County's beleaguered elections supervisor said that her employees, still processing thousands of absentee ballots, won't finish until Thursday.

Doug Mills, New York Times

Supporters on Wednesday waited for President Obama and the first family to leave their home in Chicago. For many residents, it was a day to celebrate. Many of them had worked as poll judges or volunteered for the campaign, making phone calls, registering voters and knocking on doors. “I was crying with happiness,” said one supporter.

Supervisor Penelope Townsley acknowledged that mistakes had been made in the elections process, said WFOR-TV.

With the presidential race settled -- but Florida still too close to call -- Miami-Dade's lack of final results have left a much-mocked blank spot on the long-decided electoral map.

Obama won't lose the lead in Miami-Dade, but how the final batch of ballots affects the overall number in Florida remains to be seen. Obama leads by just more than 46,000 votes, the state election department said.

MIAMI HERALD

TURNS OUT, NATE SILVER WAS RIGHT

Nate Silver was right. The Gallup Poll was wrong.

Silver, the computer expert who gave President Obama a 90 percent chance of winning over Mitt Romney, predicted on his blog, FiveThirtyEight, that the president would receive 51 percent of the popular vote as he called each of the 50 states, including all nine battlegrounds.

Gallup's final national survey on Nov. 5 gave Romney a 1-point advantage. "These polls are designed only to measure what is happening at the time of that poll in terms of the national popular vote" and are not "designed to be predictive," Gallup editor-in-chief Frank Newport said.

With the count in Florida still to be finished, Obama was leading Romney nationwide by 2 percentage points, 50 percent to 48 percent, the Associated Press reported, and won a decisive Electoral College victory.

Silver had Obama losing North Carolina and winning the other eight swing states. He also predicted Romney's win in Indiana, the only other state that Obama won in 2008 and lost in 2012.

BLOOMBERG NEWS

PIPPEN: OBAMA HAS 'A SMOOTH GAME'

Former Chicago Bulls star Scottie Pippen says President Obama has a "smooth game" on the basketball court.

Pippen described playing an Election Day game with Obama on the Chicago Bulls website. He played on Obama's team along with former Illinois Treasurer Alexi Giannoulias and two others in a game complete with referees and a running clock. Pippen and Obama's team won.

"He's not an overly aggressive player, but he takes what the defense gives him," said Pippen, a senior advisor to Chicago Bulls President and COO Michael Reinsdorf. "He's got a smooth game. He probably used to be a little more aggressive, but obviously he doesn't want to get hurt."

It was the first time Pippen had met the president, and he described Obama as very approachable. "I thought the lanes opened up when Michael Jordan used to drive," he laughed. "I used to be like, wow. But when I saw the president drive, I thought they were bringing the whole motorcade through the lane it was so wide."

Gunnar Birkerts, an internationally acclaimed modernist architect who designed buildings including the Federal Reserve Bank in Minneapolis, the Corning Museum of Glass in Corning, New York, and the University of Michigan Law Library, has died. He was 92.